


The Future Didn't Look Like This

by amare



Category: Push (2009)
Genre: Developing Relationship, Dubcon (not between Nick and Cassie), F/M, Implied/Referenced Underage Drinking, Manipulation, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Alternating, Post-Movie(s), Underage Character(s), Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-09
Updated: 2014-11-09
Packaged: 2018-02-24 18:51:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2592467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amare/pseuds/amare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Years of running from Division has Nick and Cassie on a knife's edge. It only takes a push to tip them over it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Future Didn't Look Like This

**Author's Note:**

> About the warnings/tags: This has some manipulation and dubcon, but it's definitely not of the Nick/Cassie variety and the majority of it is off-screen or alluded to. Also, Cassie is sixteen/seventeen throughout the story. More tags will likely be added later, and the rating is going to go up in part three.
> 
> I took a bit of information (that was not present in the final film) from a 2007 edition of the screenplay by David Bourla, but nothing major.
> 
> I walked out of the theater in 2009 shipping Nick/Cassie, but it took me five years to finally write it. Thanks to [its_in_the_water](http://archiveofourown.org/users/its_in_the_water/pseuds/its_in_the_water), Lizzen, [meetcutes](http://archiveofourown.org/users/meetcutes/pseuds/meetcutes), [lazulisong](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lazulisong/pseuds/lazulisong), J—for her endless patience and willingness to tweet me depressing songs—and M.
> 
> Finally, this is totally for [fyredancer](http://archiveofourown.org/users/fyredancer/pseuds/fyredancer). I hope you enjoy, bb.

Forty thousand people walked the Las Vegas strip in a given day. McCarren was an international hub, plenty of flights coming and going in case they needed to leave in a hurry, and only a few miles away from their crappy downtown motel. Nick attempted to sell her on all of that, and on coming back to America, coming home, but Vegas didn't even feel like America. Vegas felt like it was hell on her skin, which got oily if she looked at it wrong, like the best parts of it were behind a locked gate she couldn't weasel her way past, and sometimes it reminded her a little of Hong Kong. Which made her homesick. The whole thing was weird. She hoped they left soon.

Nick took a few shifts to make some legitimate money, but mainly they sat around in their room listening to the air conditioner or watching TV. Nick and boredom was a dangerous combination, and he came back drunk or smelling like hairspray a few times.

Cassie took to walking, or the bus, just zigzags around the strip until that got boring and she drifted into actual neighborhoods. Today's walk home reminded her of how much she hated it there. Dry desert heat felt wrong. The buildings weren't tall enough, the air just smelled like exhaust and grease, and she couldn't escape American tourists. She watched her booted feet make progress down the sidewalk, shutting out everything around her, and scowled at the color of her rapidly tanning legs.

A block from their motel, it hit her. Not enough to bowl her over, like her visions used to, though what she saw did make her whole body freeze.

A flash of her own hand opening the door to their room, bangles on her wrist. Nick, jerking off enthusiastically, mouth parted and eyes squinted nearly shut, one hand playing with his nipples. On the couch. His startled look as he saw her walk through the door.

"Shit," Cassie muttered. Her shoulders fell as she considered the possibility of walking in on that. She hadn't seen a clock; she didn't know how long he'd take, either. Maybe he'd take a while, since he thought he had the room to himself.

Cassie swore again and headed back the way she'd come.

 

* * *

 

He was just starting to get hungry when he heard Cassie's customary three-rap knock and a muffled, "It's me," then the key card unlocking the door. She came in holding two bags from CVS, her face red from sunburn and exertion.

"Did you walk to the strip?" he asked, popping up from the couch. They stashed water and Diet Coke and the odd bottle of whiskey in their mini-fridge in case Cassie needed to get shitfaced in the name of her visions. Nick palmed two of the water bottles and nudged her arm with one until she took it from him. "I told you to take the bus."

"Yes," she said, noisily digging through the bags. She pulled a box of hair dye, a magazine, two candy bars, and a bottle of Astroglide from one. Eyebrows lifted, she presented him with the Astroglide.

"Now you can stop using my lotion," she said, way too matter-of-factly. "It's for sensitive skin, and it's freaking expensive."

Bemused, Nick looked at the bottle of lube held in her sparkle-tipped fingers and then back at her face. She rolled her eyes at him when she saw him realize what she meant.

He took a step backwards. She put the lube on the table. Squirming and unnerved, he said, "Yeah, well… stop using my electric razor to shave your legs." He could hear it buzzing when she ran a shower, and it wasn't like he minded, but he bought her packages of disposable razors _all the time_ , and anyway this was the first straw he'd thought to grasp.

Cassie made a weird face at him, screwed up and almost appalled, before it smoothed into her general expression of teenage exasperation. Then she put her back to him and started unloading the other bag. "Fine," she said.

Letting that hang over his head wasn't going to sit well (she'd _seen_ him, she knew he used her goddamn lotion, how much had she—Nope, he couldn't think about it). Nick cleared his throat. "We got mail."

Cassie's spine stiffened like a cat's. "Miss Trouble finally has work for us, huh? About time." She kept her voice casual, and when she turned back around, she offered him one of the candy bars. King sized, because Cassie knew him too well.

"Yeah. Looks like we'll be out of here after. Bet you'll be happy."

She pushed the bottle of water against her forehead. "I don't know, Vegas has its perks. Buffets. Concerts. Live dancing girls." Cassie pointedly avoided the couch and sprawled in one of the chairs instead, putting her legs up on the table next to the pile of stuff she'd bought. "What's the job?"

"Safe deposit box. Apparently it's got a list of Division contractors and some stuff like that." Actually, it had a list of hidey-holes—places they could sabotage, track, or raid if they felt like it—and aliases, plus passports for the contractors, and a bunch of untraceable bills. But Cassie only needed to know the job was worth it.

Cassie glanced up at the ceiling as she considered and slowly moved the water bottle to her flushed cheek. "A pusher, a phaser. And moi, obviously. What are you supposed to be doing?" she asked archly.

"I'm backup."

She snorted. "Yeah, okay. Kira's really scraping the bottom of the barrel if you're the muscle."

She still said Kira's name like it was in air quotes. She pitched a fit almost every time Kira sent them after something, _especially_ if there were any hitches, and thing was, Nick couldn't really blame her. Kira reappeared in their lives only long enough to send them on dangerous goose chases. Cassie called it dirty work, but Kira couldn't do much on a street level, not when she was still embedded deep within Division. Wasn't like she could help it. It was risky enough to reach out to them and give them intel when she could.

In the last three years, Nick had spent only two days with her. There were a few anonymous text messages, two Skype conversations, crumpled notes shoved into his pocket in the middle of busy streets, and one postcard when they were in Australia. His stomach still knocked around when he saw her, but now it was mostly out of fear—worry she'd get hurt, get found out, that they'd spend another three years on opposite ends of the earth. That she'd never do enough, push enough people. Thinking like that was a rat trap, though, and he had a heist to organize.

"You can start packing, if you want. I'm gonna order a pizza."

"You and your freaking pizza," Cassie said. She unwrapped her candy bar and bit into it, speaking as she chewed. She garbled like a chicken when she did that; Nick ducked his head so she wouldn't see him grinning. "Before we leave here, you're taking me somewhere nice. Like… the Bellagio. They have good restaurants in the Bellagio."

"You hate it when we waste money," Nick said. He flipped through a stack of take-out menus until he found one that looked somewhat reputable.

"I'm a teenager, okay, I can't live off shitty food." She licked chocolate from her thumb. "I deserve it, too, for agreeing to come to this place."

"I'll take you to the Bellagio," Nick agreed, mentally going through the cards in his wallet that were still active and unflagged. There weren't many, but he'd get more once they moved—and the heist promised a nice bonus of actual cash, too.

"You better do it before we go after the deposit box. Hey, can you take me to In-N-Out?" Cassie asked.

 

* * *

 

Nick wasn't the only one with contacts, but he was pretty much the only one who could make them do anything. Cassie was resigned to her mother's legacy, the people she vaguely remembered from when she was a little kid popping up and asking for favors, people she didn't trust and sometimes actively avoided if she had the luxury of seeing them coming. First gens were happy to ask for said favors, but less happy to do them, so they relied on the network of shady characters Nick had developed, or people Kira put them on to.

Miss Trouble herself was so heavily shadowed and protected within Division, Cassie never got any flashes of her. Sometimes, if Kira broke away long enough to visit them or sneak away for a spa day or something, Cassie might see it. She'd known two of the times that Kira was going to show up on their doorstep, all sad eyes and bangs and carrying a Coach purse. She was like a hurricane, forcing them to move in a hurry, to uproot and go somewhere else. Taking what they could, burning the rest in the bathtub. Cassie wanted to move, but she would have preferred it not be because of Hurricane Kira.

Nick did take her out to eat, some four-star place that she looked completely like a sixteen year old girl in a strappy sundress in. Nick didn't look much better, tugging his tie and wearing a blazer too small for him; they were like yokels out to dinner in the big city. But he took her, and she ate his share of dessert, so they were _almost_ even now. She could _almost_ forgive him for dragging her into the casino—she didn't know which one it was, but it was definitely not one of the fancy ones—through clouds of smoke and jingling slot machines to see a freaking _magician_.

"Nick, they're not gonna let me in," she complained for the third time, lagging behind him. "You need to stop meeting people in bars."

Outside of the states, it was ridiculously easy for her to come and go as she pleased. She could wander in almost anywhere, bars, clubs, and generally people left her alone. She could go into little corner shops and buy booze, and no one asked for ID. If they did, she had a forged passport for them to glance at. One time she was forcibly removed from a bar in Shanghai, but she saw that coming and ducked away before anyone could call the cops. Other than that, Cassie roamed around like an adult. It was a different story here. If she so much as got close to a slot machine, staff came over and warned her off.

"It'll be fine," he said. "You said you didn't see anything."

"I don't need to see you being an idiot to know it's gonna happen," she said, not loud enough to reach his ears.

They finally made it out of the slot machine hell, stepping onto black glossy tiles that clicked under her heeled boots. The sounds of the machines faded some, and there were like seven different TVs all playing sports and horse racing in various parts of the bar, thankfully for her sore ears on mute. A waiter saw them and frowned at her.

"I'm sorry, sir, but we don't allow—"

Nick put his arms up like he always did, in case he had to move something or someone in a hurry. "It's all right. Jonah sent us?"

The waiter looked perturbed, but he nodded after an indecisive second. "He's near the back," he said.

"Can I get a Coke?" Cassie asked sweetly, and the waiter blinked and shook his head before walking away in a hurry. "So who's this guy again? Jonah?"

"Jonah the Mysterious. Shitty magician, he has a show in the casino a few nights a week, but he's a decent phaser. We need him to get the stuff out of the box."

"Kira's friend or yours?" she asked, as Nick spotted someone sitting in a dark corner and waved.

"Both, I guess."

What she needed to know was exactly what brand of lowlife she was dealing with. Kira tended to know ex-Division types, scummy but relatively functional, and Nick knew the people Division hunted, scummy and barely able to pass as normal, some of the time.

Jonah the Mysterious, with dark eyes and hair, a goatee, and a shiny satin shirt with weirdly puffy sleeves, smiled widely when Nick and Cassie got to his table. He had a full meal in front of him—a piece of salmon—and two cocktail glasses he'd drained.

"Nick. It's been a long time." He turned his veneers on Cassie, who slid into the booth at Nick's urging and picked up the dessert menu. "This must be the lovely Cassie."

"Just Cassie," Nick said firmly. She rolled her eyes and contemplated chocolate lava cake. "It has been a long time. I was surprised to hear you were in Vegas and taking my calls."

This always happened. Nick had to mend fences with old acquaintances, some of whom he owed money, some who owed money to him. One time a guy Nick swore up and down would help them tried to shank him, and Cassie only saw it about a minute before it happened. The first five minutes of any meeting were precarious, but Cassie hadn't seen anything, so they were fine. Probably.

"Oh, that's water under the bridge, my friend. Reno's a distant memory to me now."

"What's Reno?" Cassie asked distractedly, deciding on the chocolate lava cake if the waiter ever bothered to visit the booth again.

"It's Purgatory," Nick said, and Jonah laughed. Nick shot a little grin at her over his shoulder and explained, "D-list Vegas." Cassie made a face.

"It was a training ground," Jonah said, still smiling. He picked up his knife and fork and cut off a piece of the fish, his full sleeves quivering with the movement. "I was there to hone my skills, and you went there to learn how to throw dice. Now I've got a show in Sin City, and you're…"

"Throwing stuff a lot bigger than dice," Nick said.

"Do you use phasing in your show?" Cassie asked.

"Only small tricks. I can't risk being showy. People love to debunk a good illusion, and if I couldn't be debunked, well. That would raise too many questions."

It was pretty stupid of him to make himself a public figure in the first place, but that wasn't Cassie's problem. "Are you any good? At phasing, I mean; I don't care about pulling rabbits out of hats or whatever."

Jonah's smile faded a little, and he tilted his head at her. His eyes looked beady in the dim bar lighting. "Sure. You have any change?"

She did, in the purse strapped across her chest. She dug into the bottom and pulled out four quarters and her favorite lipgloss. The quarters she slid toward Jonah, and the gloss she applied as he pushed his plate to the side and lined the quarters up in a row.

Without any fanfare, he slipped one hand under the table, and the quarters winked out of existence.

"Neat," Cassie said blandly. She'd once seen a phaser walk into a concrete wall and come out the other side, which made this a little underwhelming in comparison. Pulling solid objects through another solid object was kind of exactly what they needed him for, so. "Did Nick tell you the details?"

"He said it was a bank job, which I'm sure you understand I have questions about." He chewed delicately on his bite of fish and rice.

"Not a bank job. It's in a bank, but we're going for a safe deposit box." Nick leaned forward, really selling it. Cassie always let him do this part. "If we get you in there, can you phase the contents out of the box?"

"If you get me into and back out of a Las Vegas bank," he chuckled too loudly at the prospect, "sure, I can pull almost anything from the box. What are the contents?"

Nick shook his head. "You're in this for the money, so you don't care about the contents. I can give you five grand today, and the rest you'll get from a share of the money that's in the box. Can you do it?"

Jonah's chewing slowed, and he gave Nick a squinty stare for a moment. Then he shrugged. "I make plenty of money; I'm doing this out of altruism. Between you and me, I wouldn't mind seeing Division go down. If you have the team to pull this off, I'm there." He paused, Adam's apple bobbing as he swallowed. "Well, not on a show day. We'll have to do it on a Tuesday or Thursday."

Nick's jaw worked in that way that meant he wanted to say something, but whatever it was, he let it go. "Fine. Tuesday or Thursday. I'll get you the names of the people we'll use. Stay in touch."

"Of course." Nick was already standing, and Cassie scooted out the booth behind him, hands on her hem to keep her skirt from riding up. "It is good to see you, Nick; you look well. And Cassie—you look so much like your mother." He went back to his salmon without another word.

"You know the best people," she muttered, when they were clear of him and almost to the slot machines again.

"Yeah, he's something. Tried to bring me in on a money laundering operation back in Reno." Nick shook his head, smiling like it was a fond memory. Nick had terrible taste in people, but at least Cassie was a good influence. "I've still gotta track down a pusher, but this is one less thing I need to worry about. You want lunch?"

Nick turned his whole body to her in expectation of her answer, bending his head in her direction to make up for the inches he still towered over her. Whatever she picked, he'd get. If she wanted to go back to the Bellagio, he'd sigh and complain about money and take her there. She could steal his dessert and he'd just push the plate at her. Cassie had a hard time with that much of his attention at once, so she chewed her lower lip and shrugged. "Wanna go into town?" she asked. "I want as much distance between me and this casino as possible."

"Sure." Nick smiled and gestured for her to keep walking, and she did.

Nick was unlocking the two-door junker he'd bought, which they were inevitably going to light on fire and leave in the desert somewhere when they left, when Cassie remembered. "Shit!"

"What?" Nick asked, instantly on alert, eyebrows drawn together and mouth tense.

"That asshole took my quarters!"

Nick's eyes widened, and he was silent for a second before he laughed. "Oh. Yeah. He does that, sorry."

"I was gonna do laundry. I can't believe he took my fucking quarters."

"You can have my quarters," Nick said.

Cassie ducked inside of the car and buckled her seatbelt, which was always too tight. "Aww, that's so sweet. But what are you going to tip your dancing girls with?"

Nick laughed again and tried the ignition until the engine finally turned over. "You don't tip strippers with quarters."

"How do you know that unless you _tried_ to tip a stripper with quarters?" Cassie said. The long line of Nick's throat revealed itself as he leaned his head back against the seat and laughed. Her mouth was curving up in a smile, and she looked out the window at the parking lot as it baked in the Vegas sun.

 

* * *

 

It took all of two days to track down a pusher and a shadow. The shadow was Nick's idea, once he realized how uncomfortable he'd be leaving Cassie alone and that bringing her along wasn't an option either. It galled Nick to do it, but he'd sent Jonah a text asking about above-board shadows who'd take a few grand to sit with a watcher for a couple of hours. Jonah knew every special on the west coast, or so he liked to boast, and Nick's connections were either sorely outdated, too dangerous, or strapped to a cot somewhere. Having Cassie out of his sight for that long with some random shadow—anyone Jonah gave character references for was automatically suspect, but it wasn't like Nick was drowning in options—made him antsy.

Especially when they met up to go over details, and Nick got a good look at the greasy fuck he was paying to make sure Division didn't get their hands on Cassie. He stuck out like a sore thumb, which was the opposite of useful for a shadow. They were supposed to repel attention, not attract it. He was sitting outside of the diner they'd agreed to meet at, picking his nails with a black boot knife, in a studded leather jacket that made Nick hot just to look at it, smoking a menthol cigarette. He looked up at Nick from under his curtain of long hair and said, "Half now, or I walk."

He took a despairing look at the group of them, Jonah like some cartoon devil with his stupid goatee, the pusher as old and brown as his cowboy boots—seriously, he was at least sixty, and Nick rarely saw first gens that old still kicking around—and the shadow who might or might not have been in a motorcycle gang. Division's most wanted, and this was the crack team he had on his side.

It hurt to part with the money he did, every penny scraped and saved, a few stolen from casinos with lazy security, but everyone agreed to the terms, and Cassie'd know if they tried to jump town without seeing it through.

Nick went back to the motel with a boxed up cinnamon roll for Cassie and significantly lighter pockets, and he watched her shove enormous chunks of the roll into her mouth.

"So we're leaving the states again after the job, probably for a while," he said, and she made an mhm sound and peeled off another bite. Her total lack of concern bugged him. He frowned, but he figured that was just Cassie. She'd left America when she was, what, ten or eleven? Nick'd hovered for a lot longer than that. "I'll buy tickets tonight." He rubbed the back of his head, thinking about what a pain in the ass it was gonna be to ditch their current IDs and to basically salt and burn everything they couldn't take with them. "Gotta pick which passport to use next, I guess."

Cassie made a contemplative face and swallowed her mouthful with some difficulty. "I'm thinking of going older. Maybe someone mysterious."

They had three sets of passports Nick thought were still clean. Brother and sister, cousins, and one that didn't come as a set—strangers with different last names. Cassie was eighteen on that one for expediency's sake. "I don't think there's anything too mysterious about moving back to Canada with your older brother," he said.

The DOB for Cassie on the brother-and-sister pair had her actual birth year. Cassie saw right through him, but all she did was sigh and finish off the cinnamon roll. "After all of this sun, Canada sounds like an improvement," she said, glumly wiping her sticky fingers on a napkin before frowning and picking at fuzz the napkin left behind. "I can't take getting another freckle, I swear to God."

"Make sure you're packed and ready to go by tomorrow morning." She waved him off. It wasn't like she was new to this, but one slip up from either of them meant sniffs on their doorsteps, no matter where they went. There'd been a mysterious fire at the facility where Nick's toothbrush was stored—one more thing to thank Kira for. "Also, uh, you'll have a shadow. I've got burner phones so you can tell me if you see anything."

He expected an explosion, several creative expletives, maybe even a slap to the table like when she was too angry to make an actual point. Lately she'd been restless, irritated, and that was when she wasn't going through phases of bleak melancholy where, when she'd actually talk about it, she wondered why they were bothering to run, and when she missed her mom so much she'd go totally silent. But when she wasn't putting a sick pit of worry in Nick's stomach, she was furious. She wanted to burn Division to the ground and raze the ashes. Currently she was feeling raze-y, and that was what he'd expected when he told her she was on the sidelines for this.

But Cassie's only reaction was to go still. "It makes, like, no sense to leave me behind," she said levelly.

"I need to make sure you're safe. If I'm focused on this job, I can't do that. It's possible they know what we're planning. Hell, three specials together is probably enough to raise a flag somewhere." If she only knew. They looked like a travelling circus.

"So if something does go wrong, I'm by myself, and I have to hope you'll get my damn text message in time." The words were said with her same deliberate calm, but Nick saw her hands bunching into fists.

"You—Not by yourself," he said, sitting down at the table next to her. He wanted to grab her fist and unclench it, but he didn't. "You're shadowed. And if anything happens, you have a chance to get away. You take that shadow, and you run until you can hole up."

She knew the protocol. She gave him a sharp look and said, "Someday you're not gonna have a good enough excuse to leave me behind."

"Don't give me that," Nick said, exasperated. "That's crap. I've dragged you to hell and back, when it's necessary, and you know I trust you to handle yourself."

Cassie stood and swiped her purse. Her head was down, waves falling forward to cover her expression. "I'm going for a walk."

"Cassie."

"Don't worry, I'll see it if someone tries to mug me. I can _handle_ myself." She was out of there like a whirlwind, and Nick knew he could use his powers to stop her, but she was already mad enough. She needed time to cool off. He just wished she'd do it somewhere other than on the fucking strip.

He could see her, tiny, blending in with the crowd, until some dark SUV at a stoplight whisked her away, a hand over her mouth so she couldn't scream. Or a porter, taking her hundreds of miles in the blink of an eye.

Nick slammed the closet door open with his powers so hard it was knocked off its track. He took a few breaths through his nose. He had to fix it before Cassie got back, but first there was packing to do. Once he finished the six-pack in the mini-fridge.

 

* * *

 

"How much is he paying you?"

Cassie was already sweating and bored in the tin can of trailer they were waiting in, so making conversation with her babysitter was as good an option as any other. The phone Nick gave her was on the chair next to her, but she didn't want to use it for anything but their check-ins. Her suitcase and backpack and purse were at her feet. She had a novel or two in her luggage, and those endless homework packets Nick kept making her complete, but she was too keyed up to do any of that. Her book was across her lap, and she rolled a colored pencil along its surface. Waiting.

Devlin the shadow looked up from whatever he was reading and smiled thinly at her. "More than he's paying you."

"Hilarious," Cassie said. "No, but I'm really curious what the going rate for shadowing a watcher is these days. Especially since I'm super high-profile. Do you charge extra for that?"

Devlin shook his head like he was maybe amused and went back to his battered magazine. He'd smoked two cigarettes so far.

The last text message she got from Nick put him at the bank entrance. Ten, twenty minutes tops to stand in line, get to the box, get the stuff out of the box, and then back to the taxi. Then they'd all split the cash and scram.

At least there _was_ cash in the safe deposit box, and Nick wouldn't have to give them every single dollar they had. They'd tried before to rely on people's drive to help out of the goodness of their hearts, or whatever, but playing that card hadn't ended well. Sometimes people were happy to do things to help, because either they hated Division for their own reasons or because Nick was just that persuasive, but some people ran if they saw them coming, and others would turn them in for a pat on the head. Or, well, they'd try to. She was getting too good to fail to notice something that dangerous.

Buying loyalty wasn't cheap, but it was more reliable than not. Cassie guessed Kira was useful for some things, and making sure they had money to pay creeps to help rob a bank was one of them.

When she looked over at Devlin, already tired of thinking about Kira, wanting to stop the racing in her head that made her worry about being too distracted to see properly, she saw he'd pulled out a wicked looking knife and was, like a totally sane person, cutting his nails with it.

"Can you actually use that thing?" she asked.

Devlin grunted. She thought she was going to be ignored, but a moment later, he threw the knife with a hard flick of his wrist, and it embedded itself in the wall. Devlin turned to her, arching one stark brow.

"Cool," Cassie said.

 

* * *

 

Nick jogged three blocks from where the taxi let him off to the safe house. It was a piece of shit, practically condemned, and he'd left Cassie and the shadow with some water bottles and a swamp cooler that sort of worked. By the time he knocked and unlocked the door, calling out for a response, he was overheated and his hair was spiked with sweat.

The front door opened to the living area, and the first thing he saw was Cassie, which released tension in his chest that had been building for hours, if not days. The second thing he saw was the knife in her hand, the concentrated pursing of her lips as she considered it. She eyeballed a spot on the wall, and Nick had enough time to note the chunks hacked out of it before she threw it with a wobbly arm. The blade nicked the wallpaper but fell uselessly to the floor.

"What the fuck?" Nick demanded.

"I know, my hand-eye coordination is shit," Cassie said, wandering over to pick up the knife. It was the shadow's knife, and she passed it to him by the handle with a shrug. "Thanks, Devlin."

Nick's eyes narrowed, and he spent a long moment looking from the shadow— _Devlin_?—to Cassie. She noticed his quiet fury, or possibly had seen his quiet fury and had orchestrated this bullshit knowing it would rile him up, and stubbornly held his gaze.

He was not getting into it in front of fucking Devlin. He pulled a roll of cash out of his pocket and shoved it at him. "Out," he said through a tight jaw. "Job's done."

Devlin tucked the money into a jacket pocket and brushed past him, but he stopped to tell Cassie, "Work on your arm strength. Throw harder, you might actually stick it." His eyes cut to Nick, and one side of his mouth slowly curled upwards.

He was lucky he closed the door behind him before Nick decided to throw him out forcibly.

"So, you're pissed," Cassie said, long-suffering. She fluttered her fingers at him expectantly. "Let's hear it."

"Are you insane?" he asked. "I leave you alone for an hour, and suddenly you're taking knife throwing lessons with a sociopath?"

"You're the one who left me with him," she huffed, flopping onto the couch like a sack of laundry. She put her legs up on the table, stretched out, and Nick knocked her boots off and sat there instead. "Figured I'd learn something useful while I waited."

"Useful? You think throwing knives is _useful_?"

"Well, you won't take me to a gun range. I guess it's this or…" She licked her lips, eyes flickering around the room, betraying for the first time nervousness instead of teenage rebellion or whatever the hell this was. "Karate?"

It wasn't like this argument was new. Cassie wheedled him all the time to teach her how to shoot (like Nick was anything more than passable), to throw a punch, to hotwire a car, and once to count cards—she thought she might have had a _knack_ for that, what with the watching. Nick shot down every single request and tried to keep her busy with more books, more packets, bought her more pencils and crayons and pens for the visions. He let her help, sure, but with stuff that let her fly under Division's radar, as much as she could.

Nick dropped his head and took a few breaths. Every time this topic came up, she fought harder. And this time she'd hit up some stranger to learn the practical and safe skill of knife throwing. Lecturing her wasn't going to work. Yelling at her never worked, and it made him feel repulsive. She wasn't his sister, and she sure as hell wasn't his kid. It only reminded them of how thin the thread connecting them was—strong as steel, but thin.

His silence eventually prompted Cassie to start talking again. "I need to know how to take care of myself, Nick. I can't expect you to take on all of Division, or some douche on the street. I need to help. This is like—I did more when I was freaking thirteen. You won't let me do _anything_."

"You don't do anything? You walk the strip at all hours, you run jobs with me, you—you fill out the goddamn applications for those credit cards. And yeah, I let you do whatever when you were thirteen because you were a stranger and I was a dumbass." He scrubbed his hands over his face, frustrated, voice ready to crack in his throat. "You should be in school, worrying about boys and what fucking color you're gonna put in your hair. You know, I can barely get you to do those packets. What about when this is over? You wanna be twenty with a sixth grade reading level? But you can throw _knives_ ," he said, bitter and nearly laughing with it, "so who cares, right?"

Cassie had curled up on the couch, knees tucked under her. God, the entire place was filthy. The couch alone deserved to be doused with gasoline, burned in the desert outside the city like their car was that morning, and here he was letting her sit on it. They were sitting close, and at this vantage Nick wasn't so much taller than her.

Her eyes shone, teary, but her face was mostly mad. "Don't put your shit on me." She swallowed heavily and shifted forward a little, like she was forcing herself to take up more space. Nick's heart thudded in his chest. "I'm not you."

There wasn't anything he could say to that. He stared at her for a minute, the quaver in her chin she was fighting. The swampy heat in the trailer felt oppressive, a weight bearing down and burning his lungs.

"Cassie—"

She sucked in a breath and her eyelids shut, and Nick leaned forward, hands going to her as if she were in danger of falling. He felt the muscles in her arms tensing, then releasing, and he forced himself to put everything but this away for the moment. He knew what this meant.

When she opened her eyes, they were dull. "Your girlfriend's gonna be in Toronto tomorrow," she said. She didn't even reach for her book, hands falling open and limp on her lap. "We need to leave if we're going to make the flight."

 

* * *

 

Nick grabbed her backpack from the overhead compartment and refused to let her carry it herself, so she blearily followed at his heels. They'd been in so many airports that no matter how crowded or confusing or even what language the signs were printed in, the two of them could probably navigate blindfolded.

When Cassie was younger, when they first left Hong Kong before circling back a year later, she was small enough that he worried about losing track of her. She had to walk in front of him at all times, or sometimes she walked beside him and gripped his sleeve, and when she had to pee, he stationed himself outside like a creepy white dude lurking outside of a girl's bathroom. Now she was older, a few inches taller, and so used to the routine that she just yawned and kept his shoulders within sight.

He got them to the customs counter and filled out all the paperwork. She yawned more and shifted from foot to foot, and there was the half-second where her heart skipped as their fake passports were examined, but the customs lady smiled and sent them on their way with a, "Welcome back."

Right. Welcome back to somewhere you've never been, Callie Theodore.

She liked to make up backstories to go along with their identities, but this one was so generic it wasn't worth the effort. Nick got her picture for it on a day when her hair was back in a ponytail and all of her streaks had faded, so Callie Theodore looked like Cassie at her plainest and least interesting. Callie and her brother Kevin, born in Who Cares, Canada, coming back to Toronto after whatever. She knew all the numbers and facts she needed to pass scrutiny; no one usually cared to look deeper.

At the baggage claim, waiting for their two suitcases to slide into view on the gleaming metal, Nick noticed her yawning. He swung an arm over her shoulders and tucked her against his side with a, "Tired?"

"I can never sleep on planes." Half of her wanted to rest her head against his chest, and the other half was rigid with surprise. They didn't hug a lot, though this wasn't the first time Nick had done this. He was stale from the plane, but she'd washed his T-shirt before they left, and it somehow _smelled_ soft. Like a pillow for her cheek.

Cassie watched the people around them, knees pressed to the side of the carousel, some kid eating Tim Horton's, and wondered what they looked like. Nick in his best jeans and a gray shirt, holding her backpack, Cassie in boots and leggings and a gauzy pink shirt with a hole under the collar, fitting into the curve of his arm. Callie and Kevin Theodore. Brother and sister.

"You'll sleep good tonight," he said, smiling down at her. The first of the luggage came sliding down the ramp, and he made an _aha_ sound she felt in her own body.

She took her backpack from him so he could carry the two suitcases, for once not complaining about the weight of hers, and he forged a path to the exit for them. He didn't seem tired, or even very wound up. He cased every exit and kept his gaze moving, searching for threats, but by the time he got to the curb, he seemed happy. After years of reading Nick's moods, he seemed like he was practically whistling.

"What's with you?" she asked him, squinting. Toronto was much, much cooler than Vegas, which she knew it would be, but nighttime wind was playing with the hem of her shirt and tightening the skin on her stomach into goosebumps. She couldn't make out much, not at night, but she did see the red logo of a Sheraton against an orange sky bruised dark around its edges.

Nick hailed one of the cabs lurking pragmatically and handed over their stuff and an address to the driver. "Nothing," he said, opening the door for her. "I'm just happy we got here in one piece."

Cassie shrugged that off—Nick was weird, and he got pleasure from weird things—but he was still lit up when he got into the cab next to her. She looked at him, shook her head, and dug through her backpack for chapstick.

There was an apartment waiting for them, furnished but likely as crappy as the extended stay motels they went for. The cab headed toward it and onto a freeway, past fields and buildings in a nest of roads looping over and under each other. Nick looked out of the window, headlights limning the side of his face and the top of his hair. Nick, who was so worn out from years of travel she could show him a world wonder and he'd say, "It's okay, I guess."

She was about to ask what his deal was again when the cold point of reality pierced her. She curled her shoulders forward and played with the fraying edge of her backpack's strap.

Of course. Kira. Kira was here, or would be here, landing the next day if Cassie's vision didn't change. He wasn't just happy they'd made it successfully, without a vision and without alerting Division. Kira made him look like that.

Cassie looked out of her own window, ignoring the pale flashes of her face reflected back at her.

 

* * *

 

Nick opened the door to Kira—and a shadow, a guy in a crisp business suit who looked like a bodyguard to anyone else. Kira gave him a sheepish smile and a shrug and said, "This is Dan. He's Division, but we can trust him. Hi, Nick."

He'd seen her coming up on two years before, during another of her temporary escapes. Whatever bullshit she told her superiors let her travel light and quickly. The shadow was supposedly to keep her shielded from Cassie or other interested watchers, but in reality, it was to keep Nick and Cassie's address out of Division hands. It was a thin line to tread. Seeing her alive and well was worth it, and the information she brought was always a godsend, but his entire stomach felt like it had been replaced by a block of ice.

Nick relaxed his grip on the doorframe and swung the door further open. "Hey. Come in."

Kira moved past him, and Nick reeled for a moment in the wake of her perfume. Dan stayed outside on the stoop, hands clasped at his front, and Nick closed the door and cleared his throat.

"Home sweet home," he said. The living room had a worn, nubbly couch and a chair that didn't match, but also a relatively new TV, and he and Cassie had their own bedrooms. The water pressure in the bathroom didn't suck. They had a kitchen and even a few pots and pans, and Cassie loved to augment their shit at flea markets and he didn't mind giving her a few bucks to do it. It was better than he'd had it in months, if not years. But even though Division had the aesthetic of a dentist's office, Kira was put up in luxury. And Nick remembered how meticulous she could be. He spilled mustard down his shirt from eating corndogs too fast, at Coney Island, and she had little towelettes in her bag that she'd laughingly pushed at him. When she wore it, her makeup never smudged. She looked good even when her brain tried to leak out of her nose.

Kira settled into the chair without really surveying the living room. Nick exhaled a breath he barely noticed he was holding.

It was always like this. Nick blamed it on time and distance, but truthfully they'd been on shaky ground since the day he left New York without saying a word, only leaving behind an extra plane ticket. The four years of bitterly trying to forget her, thinking she'd failed to follow when really Division had her, and then the separation as soon as they'd reunited… It kept them off-balance and unresolved.

It didn't help that they'd fucked again, last time. Nick even said, "This is a bad idea," right before he sealed his mouth over the hinge of her jaw. It didn't matter. Of course it was a bad idea, and of course they were stupid enough to sleep with each other. Nick didn't know if it was her way of saying goodbye, or if it was supposed to sustain him until next time, or what.

He hadn't asked. It was his fault Division got their sights on her to begin with; his fault she spent years being poked and prodded. He didn't get to ask.

So here they were, still unresolved. Stilted until they found their rhythm, usually when they got down to the business of exchanging information.

"You staying for dinner?" he asked. "Cassie's at the store. I mean, neither of us can cook, but it gets her out of the house."

She smiled. "I can cook. Maybe—" She glanced away suddenly, shook her head, and took her lower lip between her teeth for a moment, slick white teeth over slick gloss. "I can make something, if you want."

"Sure." Nick leaned against the wall; the couch was too close to the chair, and the living room was tiny besides. This gave him enough room to think. He flattened his hands behind him, keeping tension in his arms. "How long are you staying?"

"My assignment is two days. I have… I have a hotel downtown to keep up appearances."

"Two days." He drummed his fingers against the wall.

"Should I not have come? I could have gotten this to you another way," she pulled a briefcase into her lap from its place next to her chair, and plugged in the code to unlock it. "But I wanted to see you. I wanted to see how you are." There were files inside of the case, a few USB sticks, and Kira turned it to him eagerly.

"I'm fine," Nick said. "So's Cassie. That job you gave us went off with no problems. Kira, if you have the chance to get away, of course I want to see you. Of course."

She relaxed a little in the chair, closing the briefcase but not locking it. "I want to see you too," she admitted. "I look at it like a vacation. Like I'm decompressing from Division. Is that weird? That's weird." She shook her head, smiling to herself in a way that looked unkind.

"It's not weird." It was the least weird part of Kira in his living room, a room that didn't even feel like he lived in it yet. Nick scrubbed a hand through his hair. "But I mean, are you safe? Is that mafioso guy really trustworthy? How good a shadow is he?"

"I'm safe. I had to push a handler or two, but that's nothing unusual." He always warned her off of pushing too many people, leaving too much evidence, and she gave him a look before he could even open his mouth. "You know how good my pushing is. I'm here officially, so no one's asking questions, and I'll be gone before anything can go wrong."

"I don't know. I seem to recall that you can get up to a lot of trouble in two days."

Kira smiled at him, this one not hesitant or rueful. "Speak for yourself," she said, and both of them looked over at the door when Cassie came through it, holding grocery bags. Dan was behind her, carrying more.

He sent her out for toothpaste and shampoo and snacks, whatever else she wanted, and she came back with almost more than she could carry. Nick could see some kind of French bread in there, trying to bust out of the bag she had it in.

He had a moment to glance at Kira and then back at Cassie, wondering what it was going to be like this time, before Cassie plunked everything down on the bar counter behind the couch. Dan did the same, silently, before going to the front door and reclaiming his post outside.

"Hey," she said to Kira, easily, although with an odd little nod. "I saw you making pasta, so I bought… stuff."

"That's great," Kira said, just as easily. "Thank you, Cassie."

"I don't know if I got it all right. It didn't come with a recipe."

"I'll make do." She looked around at both of them and put the briefcase on their rickety coffee table, then stood up. "Do you want me to start now?"

"Whatever you want," Nick said after a short look at Cassie. They tended to get hungry around the same time, and ate whatever was in the fridge or called for take-out. Timing meals was another thing he'd forgotten people did, forgotten how to do.

"That's fine. I have to put all of Nick's crap away." She took a bag up by its handles and disappeared into the back half of the apartment. Nick heard the bathroom fan turn on.

"It's nice of you to make dinner," Nick said, because he did still remember a few things his mom taught him. "I can't remember the last time I had a home-cooked meal. You're spoiling us."

Kira's eyes crinkled when she smiled at him. Under the pantsuit, the sharp angles of her hair, now bobbed to her chin, she looked a little like the girl he met at Coney Island when he was eighteen. "It's my pleasure." She crossed the room, headed to the kitchen, and Nick got another jolt of memory with a second inhale of her perfume.

"Cassie's a lot taller now, isn't she?"

"Huh?" Nick finally peeled himself off the wall and wandered over to the counter, where she was pulling heads of lettuce and boxes of pasta from their bags and giving them scrutinizing looks.

"Cassie. She's taller. She's growing up."

"She's sixteen," Nick said. 'Cassie' and 'growing up' were not meant to be in the same sentence. Nick was widely known to have been a dumbass at sixteen, narrowly avoiding Division as many times as he avoided being tossed in juvie. Cassie was smarter than him, but Nick did remember being that young, and how far from grown up it was.

Kira, though, nodded at the food she'd unpacked and pushed up her sleeves. A silver bracelet dangled from her left wrist. "I thought so."

"I try to keep her, you know, somewhat normal. She does schoolwork. She does chores." Kira's movements in Nick's tiny kitchen were fascinating. She washed the lettuce under water carefully adjusted so it was barely stronger than a trickle, then flicked it a few times over the sink. She found their pots and pans on the first try, and she put the milk on the bottom shelf, where Cassie liked it. Nick preferred to keep it in the door. "But it's a crappy substitute for the life she should be living."

"Don't be so hard on yourself. You're doing what you have to do."

"Yeah," Nick agreed, blinking himself out of the stupor he'd fallen into while watching her work. "But it's not enough."

 

* * *

 

Kira made pasta and salad and buttery garlic French bread that smelled so good Cassie's stomach growled even as nerves made it feel sour. She even set the table up nice, paper napkins folded underneath their dinged-up silverware.

Cassie managed a smile and to thank her for cooking, and she watched Nick pluck the napkin open from its perfect fold and spread it over his lap. The prospect of sitting down to dinner with them, with Kira playing housewife, was—yikes. She got a plate out of the cupboard and loaded it up with pasta Kira'd left in a big bowl, hearing the murmur of conversation behind her like a fly buzzing at the back of her head, and added a crusty heel piece to the plate.

"Oh, I made you a plate," Kira said. Nick was chewing on a piece of bread and raised his eyebrows at her, but Cassie just doled out another smile. "Do you not like salad?" Kira's liquid brown eyes seemed very concerned.

"No, I know, I just need a sec. I'm just gonna bring this to Dan, and we're gonna have a nice chat. Go ahead and start without me."

She stuck a fork in the mound of pasta like a flagpole and went out the front door with it, shoving the whole thing in Dan's direction once it closed.

"Here. I hope you don't have a gluten allergy or something," she said, and Dan took it after a moment that lasted so long he nearly formed an expression under his sunglasses.

"I don't." He picked up the fork and awkwardly shoveled down a huge bite of pasta, strands dangling from one side of his mouth, and Cassie snorted as she watched him do it. Specials were always weird. Usually it was a level of twitchiness, or a watcher's tendency to go glassy-eyed for minutes at a time, or even a general lack of concern for hygiene, but they always managed to stand out. This dude had the presence of a Terminator—which Cassie had seen no less than four times on motel cable thanks to Nick's regrettable taste—and ate pasta like a starving dog unfamiliar with forks. _Weird will always out_ , she thought, and leaned against the railing of the balcony that overlooked their little side street, a few people coming and going.

Their apartment was in Little Italy, a second-story walkup, although from Cassie's view, the neighborhood looked pretty generic. What did she know; she'd spent the last half-decade or so in places where English wasn't heard much, let alone Italian. Nick tried to talk up the location the same way he had coming back to America: shopping and food and history and, as her expression failed to change, oh yeah, they were in walking distance of Chinatown.

Why he hadn't just put them down in Chinatown, someplace that might actually feel familiar, was a mystery to her, but much of Nick's paranoid quirks were a mystery. Some of them she could figure out by watching him, the furl he got between his eyebrows as he puzzled out logistics, but he didn't volunteer information about how he found them places to live or why they were leaving in the first place much. Asking was pointless, unless she wanted a fight, and sometimes she did, but mostly Cassie left him alone. At least this time she got her own bedroom and didn't have to listen to Nick's whistling nose-breathing all night.

Dan came and stood beside her, resting his plate on the railing ledge and keeping a protective hand on it to keep it from tipping over. He'd already demolished most of the food.

"How long you been shadowing Kira?" she asked.

"Since oh-seven hundred yesterday."

"Not what I asked." She turned toward him, leaning back and watching him quickly chew and swallow a mouthful. Shit, she should have brought him water or a Coke or one of Nick's acrid microbrews. "You work for Division?"

"Yes."

She let that one sit for a minute. A cool evening breeze stirred her hair like a hand and pushed a few strands of it into her lipgloss. "I've always wondered, do they have a good benefits package?"

"It's fine," Dan said.

"That's what I thought. Good incentives." She nodded thoughtfully. "So you work for Division, but you're shadowing this apartment, and you know who I am?"

"Yes."

"You get what I'm asking, don't you, Danny?" she said, nudging him. He managed to look like he was peering down at her despite the sunglasses obscuring his eyes.

"Yes," he said firmly, and held out the empty plate.

"I'm glad we had this talk," Cassie said, and she steeled herself before opening the door again.

Nick and Kira hadn't morphed into some happy, laughing couple in the few minutes she'd been gone. Nick's head was pointed down at his plate to minimize the time it took to get the fork to his mouth, the same hunkering he did over bowls of ramen and the boxed mac 'n cheese he liked. Kira was using her bread to help guide pasta onto her fork. They both looked over at Cassie when she sat at the table.

"Dan's nice," she said, picking up her own fork and dropping her napkin into her lap. "How long's he been double-crossing Division?"

Kira blinked and then glanced at Nick, who was still chewing and looking between the both of them neutrally, and eventually shrugged and went back to forking at her dinner. "Two years or so. He figured out that I wasn't exactly loyal, and he offered to help me if I did some favors for him."

"That sounds risky," Cassie said, but she made her tone sympathetic instead of sarcastic. The pasta was good, but Cassie hadn't expected otherwise.

"Everything with Division is. You and Nick know that better than most."

Cassie couldn't stop the face she made, scowling over her plate. It was a reminder—purposefully barbed or not, she honestly couldn't say—of what they'd lost and still stood to lose. Cassie didn't know much about Kira, but she figured reminding her that her family was fucking nowhere to be found and that everyone she came in contact with was at risk of being disposed of by an evil government agency would probably be a shit thing to do.

Nick caught her expression or maybe for once in his life realized Kira was capable of being a jerk, because he changed the subject with his mouth still full, fingers and fork hovering above his mouth like that made it less obvious. "Lucky for me, Cassie's visions keep saving my ass." He smiled across the table at her. "She knew you were coming days ago."

"So you've been practicing? Good." There was surprise and approval in her voice. Like she'd assumed Cassie was just, what, sitting on her ass eating bon-bons and getting manicures and letting Nick do all the heavy lifting.

Cassie stabbed a tomato and watched its juice slide down the tongs of her fork. "My visions used to pretty much be what I could see, you know, glimpses of the future unless something happened to change it. I got them in flashes and half the time they didn't make sense. Now they're a little longer, and sometimes I figure them out without having to draw them, and I'll get them even if they aren't things I'd see myself. If they're important enough." Before, each page of her book felt like puzzle pieces she had to look at from eighty angles until it might all fit, but now she only bothered drawing the really cryptic stuff, or just things she wanted to remember clearly.

"I'm impressed," Kira said, balancing her fork at the top of her plate and turning to giving Cassie a grin. "For a second gen, that's really remarkable. And you're essentially self-taught."

"Yeah, well, I'm still not my mother," Cassie said, not even trying to hide her bitterness.

Nick coughed theatrically into his napkin. "Her art's better too. I can usually tell what I'm looking at now. The stick figures have definitely evolved."

"Oh, really? Can I see?"

" _No_."

The legs of the chair scraped shrilly against the floor as she pushed herself away from the table. Kira and Nick looked up at her: Kira was quizzical, Nick concerned or annoyed or whatever made his mouth take on a twisted shape. Cassie looked over their heads until the light on the ceiling took up her entire field of vision.

"Thanks for dinner," she muttered.

It was a matter of seconds to turn around and find her purse, though her hands fumbled as she searched for it, and her face wanted to flame. Her back was to them, though.

"Cassie—" Nick called after her, definitely exasperated, and she banged through the front door before he could finish the rest of it.

Two blocks later, she was furious at herself for forgetting her coat, and she wiped her streaming eyes on the back of her hand. She laughed, though, throaty and ugly, when her fury prompted her to see flashes of Nick staying up in front of the TV to wait for Cassie, alone and looking exactly like she'd left him, not a hair out of place. _Good_ , she thought fiercely, and then, _I want some fucking ice cream_.

 

* * *

 

Nick poured them both whiskey in plastic purple cups Cassie bought at whatever discount store, Kira gesturing for another generous glug from the bottle until Nick's eyebrow rose in amusement. He'd forgotten how much she could put away.

He sat back and observed the dark shape of the liquor in the cup for a moment, rolling with his movements like a tiny ocean. It was easier than looking at Kira's face. Especially after the quiet disaster of dinner. She tried and failed when it came to Cassie, and Cassie—Nick didn't know if he would strictly call that _trying_ , but she could have been worse.

"So are we going to talk about it?" Kira asked him, eyes playful over the cup's rim when he glanced up.

Nick winced his way through a shrug. "At this point, if she weren't suspicious and resentful, I'd think she was a pod person." The plastic made the whiskey taste even cheaper than it was, so he set it down on the coffee table. "Still sucks, though. We've talked about it, I told her to lay off. You know, even if she doesn't trust you, I do."

"That means…" She looked embarrassed for a split second, then gave a quick smile that brightened her up again. Nick went back to staring at her hands. Every flash of eighteen-year-old Kira felt too surreal for him to deal with. "I'm glad that you do. It means a lot. But I get where she's coming from. I disrupt her life. I still haven't rescued her mom, and believe me, I haven't forgotten it. If I were her, I'd resent me too."

"Cassie doesn't have a lot of women in her life," Nick began.

Kira made that low sound, that bass note of a chuckle. "Are you expecting me to be a good influence?"

"I'm not expecting you guys to have slumber parties. But I thought she could at least try to get to know you."

"It's a little late for us to do that, Nick," Kira said softly, leaning forward in her chair like she was comforting him, closing some of the space they'd politely left. He knew he was an idiot, that it wasn't coming out right—he didn't want Cassie and Kira to bond under some fake, strained circumstances, but who did Cassie have except for him, and there were plenty of questions he didn't know the answer to. Mysterious female shit. "Even if she didn't treat me like an evil stepmother, we're not very similar."

Nick snorted and reached for the shitty whiskey again. This time, the plastic smoothness felt good against his mouth. An obstacle to announcing any more of his bad ideas, maybe. "Yeah, I can't really see you two doing the sharing and caring thing."

Kira reached over and patted his hand, a simple, friendly gesture that startled him for its rarity as much as it soothed. He watched her take another drink, and she watched him back. "She's a sister to you, and I get that. And Cassie's little crush on you, it's cute. Maybe when she grows out of it, she won't see me as such a threat."

The words were almost enough to make him choke. He'd never thought of it that way, but he managed a wry half-smile. "Yeah, maybe."

Part of him was relieved. Kira seemed to get it; he knew her inability to help Cassie's mom, at least so far, was a major sticking point, and it seemed like Kira had been blind to how deep that went, but maybe not. It was starting to seem like she had a better grasp on the Cassie-and-Kira situation than Nick did. She didn't take it personally. Cassie was protective because Nick was all she knew and for regular teenage girl reasons, and spelled out like that, it made a lot of sense. It didn't seem as insurmountable.

"Should we get down to business?" Kira said, tapping her fingers on the closed briefcase.

"Yeah, might as well." Cassie wouldn't be home for a while, so there wasn't a better opportunity to go over the intel. He smarted to picture her walking in the dark, probably far beyond the bounds of their neighborhood, but a wave of weary fondness washed over him too. She'd be back when she'd burned out most of her fury, and she'd plop down on the couch like some knock-kneed colt and hog the remote until he made her go to bed, same as any other night.

Maybe he'd talk to her, get her to retract her claws a little. But even if he didn't, things were going to be fine.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed part one! It's basically the calm before the storm of parts two and three, which are a lot meatier (this part is basically setting the board and letting everyone know what Cassie and Nick are up to). I hope to write the rest speedily, as the parts are outlined and I'm underway with two, but life/work does tend to get in the way.
> 
> If I missed something you think needs warning/tagging for, please let me know.


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